Almost half of the men incarcerated at a Muskegon-based-prison have now tested positive for the coronavirus after an outbreak occurred earlier this month. Roughly 47%, or 612 of 1,296 prisoners at Muskegon Correctional Facility, have tested positive as of last Thursday, meanwhile 15 staff members have also tested positive.
Some prisoners are blaming the prison for an inadequate response to the virus and fear further spread, but prison officials say they’ve taken proper safety steps.
Chris Guatz Is with the Michigan Dept. of Correcrtions. He says, that until earlier this month, the Department had been an industry leader when it came to containing the coronavirus inside its prisons, and that the MDOC had done everything in its power to keep outbreaks to a minimum.
“One of the reasons why they’ve had no outbreaks, or even no positive is because of all the mitigation measures, and social distancing and requirement of mask wearing by both prisoners and staff now for months,” Gautz said. “But again, as we preach every day to our wardens, to our prisoners and employees, and our message every day, is that this is not the time to become complacent, because it only takes one person who may be an asymptomatic carrier to spread it into our prisons, back onto our staff, and then our staff out into the community…so we have to be really diligent about that.”
Since March, 4,620 of 37,497 state prisoners have tested positive and 68 prisoners have died.
Meanwhile, State health officials on Sunday reported 768 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 and four related deaths. Overall, Michigan has reported 96,792 confirmed positive cases and 6,393 deaths since the start of the pandemic.